This invention relates to apparatus and methods for assembly of personal care absorbent articles, as well as to such personal care absorbent articles. More specifically, this invention relates to methods of assembly and apparatus for assembling especially re-fastenable personal care absorbent articles wherein the methods of the invention attenuate certain counterproductive aspects of conventional manufacture of such personal care absorbent articles. While embodiments of the present invention are described herein in terms of personal care absorbent articles such as pull-on pants or adult incontinence briefs, the invention includes, and is equally applicable to a wide variety of articles fabricated in web formats, such products as infant diapers, training pants, and the like.
In conventional methods for fabricating disposable personal care articles, it is known to fold over a web or webs of a stream of workpieces at a first, relatively earlier stage in the manufacturing process to form a stream of individual personal care article precursors.
Yet other conventional methods reflect adjacent personal care article precursors being attached to one another along the stream of workpieces by e.g. front portion material, wherein the front portion material is cut out or apart to separate such articles at the end of the process. Associated with the second, relatively later stage of conventional manufacturing processes is the excision and removal of significant cut-out portions affiliated with e.g. front portion materials, leg cut-out regions, and/or trim between side seams of adjacent articles, from the web or webs resulting in significant material waste attributable to such inefficient conventional manufacturing processes.
A need exists for improved methods for production of personal care absorbent articles wherein the methods are effective to attenuate waste in a manufacturing process as well as to reduce cost inevitably associated with inefficiency of such manufacturing process.
Thus, it is an object of this invention to provide methods for production of personal care absorbent articles which methods maintain unsegmented streams of workpieces, without severing respective front portions and rear portions from a respective web sausage, until relatively late in the process, with respect to conventional methods, thereby enabling manufacturers of personal care articles to integrate personal care article components into the web sausage in the context of an entire stream of workpieces rather than individual workpiece precursors.
It is another object of this invention to provide methods for the production of personal care absorbent articles which methods improve control and stability of the stream of workpieces as such stream of workpieces is affected along the manufacturing line.
It is a further object to provide manufacturing processes which reduce cost to manufacturers by enabling a manufacturer to minimizing on-line material waste associated with the manufacturing process.